This holiday season is unique. With inflation and tighter budgets, it's a buyer's market. Consumers are more selective and value-focused, so retailers must pull out all the stops—gamified shopping experiences, better deals, exclusive offers, fast shipping, streamlined checkout processes, and seamless returns. Retailers are eager to create the best digital experience possible, with a projected $21.6 billion on the line this holiday season.
However, software bugs bite the bottom line - period. How can retailers prepare for one of the year's highest web traffic and revenue generation days, proactively handle issues as they arise, and avoid hindering developer productivity?
The answer is simple: continuous quality. By the end of this blog, you’ll know how to ensure seamless digital experiences that keep shoppers happy and revenue flowing and that your development teams are equipped with the right tools from pre-to-post production. Whether prepping for Black Friday, the Christmas season, or big shopping days in 2025, the continuous quality practices covered here will guide you through any major release.
Meet customers where they are across any device or browser
Imagine you're a retail brand selling athleisure clothing to young adults. These consumers are more inclined to shop on their mobile phones and are the first to snag the latest iPhone and run on the newest iOS version. You're risking revenue if you aren’t adequately testing on the platforms your target customers use to shop.
But how do you ensure you can reach your most important consumers? Leverage cross-browser and mobile app testing on a robust cloud infrastructure using a data-driven strategy to execute.
Access to a wide range of devices, OSs, and browser combinations through cross-browser testing ensures a seamless digital experience for customers worldwide. This is especially crucial given the rising competition for the best deals.
The cloud simplifies software testing with scalable, cost-efficient environments that are easily accessible and quickly deployable. The right cloud provider is a gift that keeps giving, allowing you to test on the most in-demand devices and OSes—unlike on-premise solutions that may lack updated infrastructure.
Mobile emulators and simulators in the cloud offer a cost-effective way to quickly catch bugs and usability issues. They allow testing across different configurations, providing critical insights into software performance before moving to real devices.
Gather shopper demographics data about your key customers and identify the browsers, devices, and platforms they engage on. Tailor testing to the specific devices, browsers, and OSes your audience favors. For instance, shopping on a mobile device has become ubiquitous, with 91% of adults reporting frequently purchasing on their phones.
Source: The Verge
To summarize, effectively meeting your customers where they are is essential. Test on the devices and platforms your highest-value customers use, and lean into mobile as online shopping increases. Leveraging cross-browser testing on a cloud infrastructure ensures you provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
But, even with the best software quality setup, issues can still arise. Addressing them quickly is the key to mitigating risk and protecting revenue.
Quickly address issues to maintain revenue
As businesses prepare for major software releases, they must balance delivering a flawless digital experience with the pressure of an approaching code freeze date. With limited time and numerous bugs to fix, prioritizing the most critical issues is essential. A solid quality strategy enables teams to address problems quickly, preventing bugs from impacting holiday sales and helping them stay on schedule.
Timely debugging facilitates the rapid rollout of new features and promotions to attract customers during the holidays and ensures well-functioning software that builds brand trust. Neglected issues can lead to negative reviews and customer loss, jeopardizing long-term revenue.
By utilizing a solid debugging tool, teams can streamline root cause analysis to gain insights into recurring problems, improving future releases and avoiding similar issues. A solid debugging tool can help:
Support quick diagnosis of bugs and enhance the user experience, which is crucial for maintaining conversion rates.
Identifying performance bottlenecks and issues before they affect users is critical during a high-traffic period that significantly stresses applications.
Source: Sauce Error Reporting
Leveraging real-time feedback further enhances app improvements, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
Use real-time feedback for app improvements
Flaky tests are the bane of a software professional’s existence. If they fail during critical testing phases, they can delay the release of features or updates. This is especially problematic during high-traffic periods when downtime can lead to lost sales. Troubleshooting flaky tests requires time and effort, diverting resources from more valuable activities like feature development or performance optimization, which are crucial during peak shopping times.
Sauce Insights and Failure Analysis support you in applying data insights across the entire SDLC, from build to operation.
Leveraging test data and insights will help ensure you take a strategic approach to software development, resulting in operational efficiencies and testing effectiveness. Historical data, for instance, informs future sales cycles and the proper tests across the SDLC. Sauce Insights provides detailed analytics on app performance and user behavior for real-time feedback, helping retailers understand how customers interact with their app, identify potential bottlenecks, and optimize for high traffic during major sales events.
Prioritize continuous testing and test case management.
Quality code and proactive software quality strategies are the keys to success when preparing for any big release, whether Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or some peak shopping event next year. By leveraging advanced diagnostics, real-time feedback, and comprehensive error reporting, developers can swiftly identify and resolve issues before they impact users.
This holiday season, prioritizing continuous testing and employing effective test data management will enhance app performance and foster customer satisfaction and loyalty. In a landscape where every experience counts, the right tools and strategies can turn potential pitfalls into opportunities for success.
When you push code, you’re not just releasing software – you’re putting your reputation on the line. Don’t become another broken experience. Code is the foundation on which the digital experience is built - so let's make it quality.
